This turns out to have been easier than anticipated, having followed at large the guide available at gadgetreactor. Some quick notes on fun facts I ran into:
- If you were thinking of using a VM and USB passthrough, think again. It may or may not work. Do yourself a favor and don’t waste a few hours trying with Virtualbox, VMWare player or whatever trying to make it work.
- If you are a decent cloud netizen, most of your stuff is already in Dropbox/GDrive/GMail/etc. Thus, if your tablet is predominantly a couch computing device you probably don’t need a backup in the first place. Worst case scenario, you’ll lose your angry birds high scores.
- TWRP, once booted, seems to expose a USB media device for read/write purposes. Hence, you don’t really need a USB OTG thumbdrive. Just make sure that TWRP is installed, boot into it and try to create/copy a file prior to wiping everything.
- There is some kind of issue with the current slim Gapps which requires the mini-gapps to be flushed before full-gapps. If you just install the full-gapps Google Play Store and Services will be unavailable and your N7 largely useless.
This was it. On retrospect it was rather easy, most of the time and effort spend on trying to make USB passthrough work rather than using my spare Windows laptop.
Device is quite responsive with the latest firmware. I really like the new “cards” layout when I view the open apps but other than that the new interface is a little bit heavy on visuals. Overall it’s probably a welcome upgrade.
~mperedim/weblog 